First Play: Create your own grand prix team in F1 Manager 24

We’ll have to get the obvious joke out of the way to begin with.

For the third edition of their official Formula 1 management game, Frontier are giving players the ability to create their own team and join the championship to compete against the existing 10.

No doubt the Andrettis would tell you this is an extremely unrealistic addition to the game.

It’s not the only new feature F1 Manager 24 will offer those who want to try their hand at being a virtual team principal. There is a new ‘mentality’ system which governs the behaviour of all staff, including drivers. Junior driver programmes are now fully modelled and you can sign up to 10 to your team as ‘affiliates’.

During the races, you can expect to encounter more technical challenges which you can help your drivers respond to. Helpfully, there is a new ‘helicam’ view allowing you to keep an eye on your cars.

But the ‘Create a Team’ feature is the headline addition. RaceFans had the chance to play an early preview build of F1 Manager 24 to test it and other changes.

You are offered six options when setting up your team for the first time. One is effectively a blank slate to start completely from scratch, while the others give you ready-made back stories, such as a wealthy entrepreneur or luxury car manufacturer seeking success in F1.

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The livery, overalls and logo editors are immediately familiar from other games, such as the official Formula 1 racing title, which has offered a similar ‘MyTeam’ mode since its 2020 edition. If the RaceFans-coloured design in these screenshots looks rough to you, consider it a reflection on my lack of time and design skills.

There are sufficient options to create endless styles which will set your car apart from the rest of the field. Though, as we’ve sadly come to expect, nothing as liberating as being able to import your own skins made in third-party software such as Photoshop.

The staff hiring and firing options are largely familiar from previous games. Perhaps over-mindful of FOM’s demand that any new entrants show they are “competitive”, I poached Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton from their teams, leaving Red Bull and Mercedes to plough on with Richard Verschoor and Roman Stanek respectively. It’ll be a tough day for the RaceFans servers if that driver market double-whammy ever comes to pass.

The sponsorship management system is more nuanced than in previous games. The bigger the deal, the more time you’ll have to commit to looking after your clients, which drains your staff’s time.

It struck me as strange that the value of your sponsorship deals is seemingly not connected to the size and position of the logos. My sponsors were content to pay the same for massive, garish logos as they were for tiny ones which were invisible against my car’s colour scheme. In the real world, Hewlett-Packard will have paid top dollar to add their corporate blue to Ferrari’s red.

Having missed no opportunity to give myself every advantage available, Team RaceFans swept to a one-three debut triumph. Verstappen only failed to complete a perfect result because he picked up a puncture on his in-lap before his tyre change.

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Both drivers had a 4kg fuel deficit after their last pit stops, making the final stint a nail-biter. Even having shamelessly dealt myself the strongest possible hand in setting up my team, it wasn’t a totally straightforward victory, so the difficulty level looks well-pitched.

For the second part of our trial run with F1 Manager 24 the development team pits us against a race scenario where we are managing the Red Bull drivers who are stuck in the midfield at Melbourne with various technical problems developing on the power units and gearboxes in their RB20s.

As their race engineers flag up the developing problems, I have to nudge the drivers towards more conservative approaches to keep their cars running. Moving Vertappen to a one-stop strategy to get him into free air works well and a podium finish is on the cards.

But when Perez drops out of the points places I thoughtlessly tell him to push flat-out anyway, reasoning that a no-score is a no-score regardless of whether the car breaks down. His subsequent retirement triggers a Safety Car period which harpoons Verstappen’s strategy, leaving him ninth. If only I’d paid attention to McLaren warning Oscar Piastri not to cause a Safety Car while his team mate was heading for victory in Miami last weekend.

Create a Team promises a level of customisation many players have been eager to see since this series arrived two years ago. Frontier looks set to reward buyers of the upcoming F1 Manager game with a satisfyingly detailed implementation of the concept, as well as a raft of updates which create a more realistic facsimile of the F1 racing universe.

This being an early development build of the game, not all of the new features behave the way they are intended to in the finished version, including some of the notifications regarding car failures in-race, which made staying on top of them a little tricky. But as always we will wait until playing the final release version of the game before passing judgement.

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F1 Manager 24 trailer

F1 Manager 24 will arrive for PC and major consoles on July 23rd.

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